Satisfaction Not Guaranteed: Reading Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong is a liar, or at least was a liar, though the old motherly wisdom here probably stands: once, always. And depending on one’s perspective, his athletic accomplishments are at best tainted and at worst entirely invalidated—though you try riding a bike up the Col du Tourmalet. His accomplishments as a humanitarian and fundraiser, meanwhile, are surely somehow altered by his having been unmasked as a cheater and bully, though they may endure as valuable contributions and even be celebrated as such. But what about his standing and reputation as a writer?

First, a point of clarification: Lance Armstrong is not a writer, or at least not a person who sat down by himself at a desk—pulling his hair out as he fussed with sentence structure—to write the two memoirs published in his name, “It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life” and “Every Second Counts.” Both were written with Sally Jenkins, a sportswriter for the Washington Post. Neither book hides that fact; Jenkins’s name is on the cover of each, but printed smaller than that of the main attraction. Lance Armstrong’s name sold these books, and in the parlance of popular discussion, they are his books, just as the President’s speeches are the President’s, regardless of who wrote them. And, like everything else related to the once great and now cracked Empire of Lance, the books—big sellers in their time—have been dusted off, given a second look, and have come under attack.

Last week, in California, two plaintiffs, Rob Stutzman and Jonathan Wheeler, filed a class-action lawsuit against Armstrong, as well as the publishers Penguin and Random House, alleging that, according to the filing, they “were misled by Defendants’ statements and purchased Defendant Armstrong’s books based upon the false belief that they were true and honest works of nonfiction.” It also claims that the defendants “knew or should have known that these books were works of fiction.” (The co-author, Jenkins, is not named in the suit.) The plaintiffs are demanding a full refund of the purchase price of the two books—for themselves and any other Californians who want to join in the suit—along with other damages and attorneys’ fees.

Legal writing, save for the prose of a precious few lawyers and judges, has rarely contributed to the literary enterprise. Yet there are times when legal proceedings have helped the public at large to reconsider the experience of reading in commercial, emotional, and intellectual terms. Judge John Woolsey wrote a brave and sensitive opinion when charges of obscenity were brought against James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, becoming a kind of spokesman for the American lay reader, not only helping to give people wide access to the book but also offering a guide in appreciating it as “a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.” This filing against Armstrong does not meet those erudite standards, nor is it likely to weigh in the history of literature, yet it nonetheless manages to frame important questions of modern book buying and reading.

Amid the technical language of the suit—which runs to more than fifty pages and contains a startlingly comprehensive catalogue of Armstrong’s public and private obfuscations over the years—are professions of wounded emotions, in which the alleged wrong perpetrated against the two plaintiffs is described as a kind of personal trespass. Of one plaintiff, we learn:

Stutzman bought the book in California and read it cover to cover. Although Stutzman does not buy or read many books, he found Armstrong’s book incredibly compelling and recommended the book to several friends.

The violations here are legion, starting with the fact that Stutzman, an apparent bibliophobe, was tricked into eagerly reading an entire book, then conned into actually liking it, and finally was compelled to make an utter ass of himself by recommending this now manifestly fiction-filled book to his friends. In the realm of wrongs, both personal and cosmic, this may seem a minor one, but the filing drives home the damage these books seem to have done to the plaintiffs, adding that after Armstrong stepped into Oprah Winfrey’s mass-media confessional, “Stutzman felt duped, cheated and betrayed,” and “the disappointed Wheeler felt cheated and betrayed.” (Of the actual legal merits of the case I have no expertise nor opinion, though similar class-action suits—one involving Greg Mortenson’s disputed memoir “Three Cups of Tea,” and another centering on Jimmy Carter’s “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”—have failed to make it to trial. Another case, brought against Random House in regard to James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” was settled out of court.)

Both plaintiffs, it seems plain from the language of their lawyers, would not be receptive to a kind of lit-theory ambivalence that suggests that writing—be it fiction, history, poetry, biography, etc.—is, by its nature as artistic expression, both partly true and partly false. Nor would they take comfort from the idea that there is a nearly uniform level of untruth in the self-written accounts of most everyone’s lives—lies, omissions, misdirections, forgotten episodes, and spared feelings. Or as Daniel Mendelsohn notes, in his essay in the magazine about the rise of the memoir, quoting Sigmund Freud, “What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity.”

The equation for the plaintiffs, instead, is more simple: when Lance Armstrong wrote the following sentences in “It’s Not About the Bike,” he was lying, and this lie spoils the book and makes its classification as nonfiction both false and misleading:

Doping is an unfortunate fact of life in cycling, or any other endurance sport for that matter. Inevitably, some teams and riders feel it’s like nuclear weapons—they have to do it to stay competitive within the peloton. I never felt that way, and certainly after chemo the idea of putting anything foreign in my body was especially repulsive.

Certainly we should cringe at this passage, because we now know it to be false, but also because the lie becomes dirtier and sadder when we see Armstrong bullying us with the emotional and rhetorical power of his struggle with cancer. (Of course, this pitiless strong-arming is just what Armstrong has been doing all these years, but seeing it here in prose makes it all the more stark.) But the books are also full of what remain true stories: about his cancer treatments, his incredible hours-long workouts, his strategic brilliance on the bike, and the joy he felt at starting a family. Thus the lawsuit misapplies the conventions of genre by insisting that because they contain false information, these books should be considered fiction. (That insults novels at least as much as it insults these books.) They are not “fake memoirs” in the manner of “A Million Little Pieces,” or Binjamin Wilkomirski’s faux Holocaust-survivor memoir “Fragments,” or Margaret B. Jones’s mock gang history “Love and Consequences”—all books that could have been printed as fiction if their authors had had the courage to wade into the uncertain and largely unremunerative waters of that end of the publishing industry. Armstrong’s books had lower aims, and, for their author, they were essentially mercenary: a place for him to build a brand and tell his (partly false) side of a contentious story.

That explains why Armstrong wrote these books, and why he lied in their pages. A greater question—central to this particular lawsuit, and to the outrage that other readers have felt at being “duped” by false personal histories—is why did people read them?

In the essay “How Should One Read a Book,” Virginia Woolf offers an explanation for the relatively modern popularity of biography and memoir:

Shall we read them in the first place to satisfy that curiosity which possesses us sometimes when in the evening we linger in front of a house where the lights are lit and the blinds not yet drawn, and each floor of the house shows us a different section of human life in being? Then we are consumed with curiosity about the lives of these people—the servants gossiping, the gentlemen dining, the girl dressing for a party, the old woman at the window with her knitting. Who are they, what are they, what are their names, their occupations, their thoughts, and adventures?

Biographies and memoirs answer such questions, light up innumerable such houses; they show us people going about their daily affairs, toiling, failing, succeeding, eating, hating, loving, until they die. And sometimes as we watch, the house fades and the iron railings vanish and we are out at sea; we are hunting, sailing, fighting; we are among savages and soldiers; we are taking part in great campaigns.

One plaintiff, Jonathan Wheeler, was a recreational cyclist and an increasingly devoted fan of Lance Armstrong’s exploits. We can imagine Wheeler taking his bike out for a spin, all the while replaying the grand deeds of Armstrong and imagining himself in the peloton, “taking part in the great campaigns.” The books, therefore, offered a window not necessarily into the man but into his great success. The popularity of triumphant sports memoirs such as these suggests that this kind of fandom is widespread. Of the other plaintiff, Rob Stutzman, we read that he found the book to be “inspiring,” and that he even recommended it to friends who were battling cancer. For years, he treasured the lessons of perseverance and hard work, until last month, when all those lessons were blackened. Both men admired the book as they read it, only to have their memory of it altered by revelations that came later. In a way, the experience is a bit like coming to new terms with a book you once loved.

Short of a legal proceeding, how are disenchanted or disappointed readers to find redress? That question leads to others: What kind of commodity is a book? What can we expect a book to do for us? And are there particular situations in which we might expect to get our money back?

Many interactions with books are clearly transactional: if we buy a cookbook or a test-prep manual or a copy of “Spanish for Dummies,” we would rightly be angry if the recipes were harebrained, the test answers were incorrect, or all the language translations were in French. But can we clamor for a refund for the Julia Child cookbook we bought back in the sixties that we now realize has been poisoning our family with butter and salt for all these years?

Then there are other books, most books probably, all of which are clearly products, but which sell us something more ineffable. Perhaps people do send back detective novels when they don’t like who the killer was, or e-mail Amazon in a rage when “The Kama Sutra” puts their backs out. In the case of Armstrong, can we put a value or a standard of quality on being transported to a bike race in the French Alps, or being inspired to get in shape or fight back against a disease? And can we therefore put a negative value on the falsehoods in the book that muddle those experiences? Supposed nonfiction books fail some ethical test when they contain self-serving lies, or instances of plagiarism, or false reporting—but perhaps the negative Amazon review is the only real sword we can expect to wield. And, in the end, maybe books don’t do anything, neither in the conventional commercial sense nor in the limited emotional vocabulary of “inspiration” and self-improvement. As Virginia Woolf writes,

Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practice because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final?

Questions of ethics aside, however, the lies in the Armstrong memoirs undoubtedly damaged the narrative quality of the books as books, since the most interesting thing about Armstrong is that he lived a very public double life for the better part of two decades, and his wide and robust fame was based largely on the fact that he had succeeded as a clean competitor in a very dirty sport. Then again, the kind of mind that can perpetuate an essential mistruth while under persistent investigation and the constant threat of revelation is exactly the kind of mind whose book might be worth reading.

But as David Foster Wallace explained in the essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” successful athletes rarely write those kinds of memoirs; their books are mostly filled with bromides—part self-help, part empty platitudes about vague hard work or good luck. These books are “inspirational” in a way that made “It’s Not About the Bike” a best-seller, and “instructional” in only the vaguest sense; they showed what hours and hours of brutal and single-minded exercise can help a person do, and regardless of what we now know about Armstrong, their subject and insight was especially narrow: man spends all his time on bike, becomes best at riding bike.

Wallace argues that sports memoirs are mostly insipid because great athletes can rarely explain the thing we most want to know, which is how it feels to be so graceful and gifted. He writes:

It turns out that inspirational is being used on the book jacket only in its ad-cliché sense, one basically equivalent to heartwarming or feel-good or even (God forbid) triumphant. Like all good ad clichés, it manages to suggest everything and mean nothing.

In a funny twist, the Lance Armstrong memoir that would be worth reading, and really parsing and getting upset about or arguing about, would be the one he would write tomorrow, or next year. The public’s appetite, however, may be extremely limited—and with good reason. We’ve given this guy a lot of attention and several chances. And, anyway, Armstrong does not seem to possess the kind of rugged introspection needed to give an actual tell-all, the one about his brain and our credulity, any real substance. Defiance is the character trait that helped make him a good cyclist, a good cheater, and a captivating spokesman for cancer research. It doesn’t make for much of a memoirist.

Photograph by Beatrice de Gea/The New York Times/Redux.

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.

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